Trading System Assessment

The Problem:

A $300+ Billion diversified international asset manager was questioning the effectiveness of their trading system. They turned to Adeptyx for help in assessing their existing processes for order generation, pre and post-trade compliance, trading, and post-trade functions.

What We Did:

Adeptyx explored the following questions in their assessment:

Is there a “better” set of technologies available in the marketplace to meet their needs?

If the firm were to stay with their current system, what are the best ways to address the shortcomings of the status quo?

If the firm decided to look at alternative solutions:

What might a reasonable timeframe / expense be to undertake a change?

Are the expected benefits worth the effort?

What should the firm do tactically regardless of any alternative?

Adeptyx identified the following key findings:

No fires to put out in order generation

The client’s past investment in their current OMS and proprietary systems were yielding results

Opportunities existed to better leverage the current system & avoid software decay

Business needed to take on more ownership with dedicated resources

Existing usage of the OMS needed to be “retuned”, especially for compliance

Too many false compliance warnings caused by:

Significant turnover in staff who write rules causing training issues

Insufficient effort to keep rules clean

Security Master information problems

Compliance system bugs and limitations

Ability to view and understand rule result

Serious concerns about the existing system vendor

The existing vendor was adding significant new functionality that would benefit the business

However, the vendor had “real” software quality & delivery problems with no evidence of a viable plan to address the problems. The vendor’s clients were not optimistic about its ability to fix the situation in the near term.

If issues remained unresolved, it was likely the client would need to implement manual work-a-rounds for a long period of time.

The Results:

As a result of the Adeptyx assessment, the client reviewed the situation with the existing vendor. Given the critical nature of trading to their business, the client changed vendors in order to avoid putting the firm at risk and migrated to a new solution.